Herbert Marcuse Miles T02094 00 pre 1 07/11/2011 15:15 Modern European Thinkers Series Editors: Anne Beech and David Castle Over the past few decades, Anglo-American social science and humanities have experienced an unprecedented interrogation, revision and strengthening of their methodologies and theoretical underpinnings through the influence of highly innovative scholarship from continental Europe. In the fields of philosophy, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, critical theory and beyond, the works of a succession of pioneering writers have had revolutionary effects on Anglo-American academia. However, much of this work is extremely challenging, and some is hard or impossible to obtain in English translation. This series provides clear and concise introductions to the ideas and work of key European thinkers. As well as being comprehensive, accessible introductory texts, the titles in the ‘Modern European Thinkers’ series retain Pluto’s characteristic radical political slant, and critically evaluate leading theorists in terms of their contribution to genuinely radical and progressive intellectual endeavour. And while the series does explore the leading lights, it also looks beyond the big names that have dominated theoretical debates to highlight the contribution of extremely important but less well-known figures. Also available Hannah Arendt Gilles Deleuze Finn Bowring John Marks Alain Badiou André Gorz Jason Barker Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman Georges Bataille Félix Guattari Benjamin Noys Gary Genosko Jean Baudrillard Jürgen Habermas Mike Gane Luke Goode Walter Benjamin Guy Hocquenghem Esther Leslie Bill Marshall Pierre Bourdieu Slavoj Žižek Jeremy F. Lane Ian Parker Miles T02094 00 pre 2 07/11/2011 15:15 Herbert Marcuse an aesthetics of Liberation Malcolm Miles Miles T02094 00 pre 3 07/11/2011 15:15 First published 2012 by Pluto Press 345 archway road, London N6 5aa www.plutobooks.com Distributed in the united states of america exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of st. Martin’s Press LLc, 175 Fifth avenue, New York, NY 10010 copyright © Malcolm Miles 2012 the right of Malcolm Miles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988. british Library cataloguing in Publication Data a catalogue record for this book is available from the british Library IsbN 978 0 7453 3039 6 Hardback IsbN 978 0 7453 3038 9 Paperback Library of congress cataloging in Publication Data applied for this book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by chase Publishing services Ltd typeset from disk by stanford DtP services, Northampton, england simultaneously printed digitally by cPI antony rowe, chippenham, uK and edwards bros in the united states of america Miles T02094 00 pre 4 07/11/2011 15:15 contents Introduction 1 1 Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Society 10 2 The Artist and Social Theory 27 3 Affirmations 46 4 A Literature of Intimacy 65 5 Society as a Work of Art 86 6 The End of Utopia 106 7 The Aesthetic Dimension 126 8 Legacies and Practices 145 Notes 165 Index 191 Miles T02094 00 pre 5 07/11/2011 15:15 Miles T02094 00 pre 6 07/11/2011 15:15 Introduction In this Introduction I set out my aims in writing the book, its scope, and why I think that Herbert Marcuse’s writing is of interest today. I explain why I address his work on aesthetics rather than the wider project for a critical theory of society, sketch the book’s organisation, and finally say a little of the background from which I wrote it. AIms And scope My aim is to increase interest in Marcuse’s writing on aesthetics. Although there has been a proliferation of commentary on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno – his contemporaries in the development of critical theory, both of whom also emphasised aesthetics – less has been published on Marcuse’s work. Benjamin’s essay on the work of art1 has been used almost to exhaustion in courses on photography and media arts, and Adorno is seen as a more philosophically weighty contributor. Yet in the 1960s, when it seemed society might change, Marcuse’s writing reached a wider readership and evoked a more immediate engagement with the problems and potential benefits of a cultural revolt. Marcuse died in 1979, after which a few books on his work were published.2 But his theories then fell into neglect until publication of the Collected Papers began in 1998,3 followed by a further few critical titles.4 Yet the Collected Papers, edited by Douglas Kellner in collaboration with Peter Marcuse, show the depth of Marcuse’s insights into culture, and the consistency of his pursuit of an understanding of social change. At the time of writing, five of the planned six volumes are in print, and have been a key source for my re-reading of Marcuse’s work. Organised thematically, the Collected Papers juxtapose both well-known and hitherto unpublished material. But the Collected Papers will appeal to readers already interested in Marcuse’s work. I make no claim to compete with Kellner’s scholarly introductions to each volume, and aim instead to offer an introductory commentary relating specifically to Marcuse’s aesthetic theories. An increasing tendency towards interdisciplinary work since the 1970s suggests that Marcuse’s effort to integrate social, cultural, 1 Miles T02094 01 text 1 07/11/2011 15:15 2 Herbert mArcuse political and psychoanalytic insights will be of methodological interest, too, across the arts, humanities and social sciences. His willingness to present seemingly opposed polarities – such as art’s social and aesthetic dimensions – as potentially creative tensions, is also interesting, in a period when both education and politics seem driven increasingly by a need for solutions. For the most part, Marcuse’s writing was work in progress, developed in the 1960s from one paper to the next as he spoke at student gatherings as well as academic conferences; ideas migrated, and questions were kept open. Andrew Feenberg, a colleague in the 1960s, recalls that Marcuse did not predict the revolution but elaborated ‘the conditions of its possibility’.5 I read this as the necessary ground for an imaginative reconstruction of society, and the beginning of a longer project of realisation. To introduce Marcuse’s writing on aesthetics is less difficult than, say, to comment on Adorno’s work with its long sentences and aversion to paragraph breaks, or to explain Ernst Bloch’s unrestricted eclecticism. When an interviewer suggested to him that his writing was ‘difficult to understand’, Marcuse replied that he regretted such difficulty, adding (in his German accent) ‘I try to write clearer’ and that he took comfort in the fact ‘that a few people do and did understand it’.6 In fact, his most important texts are remarkably succinct: An Essay on Liberation7 and The Aesthetic Dimension8 are each less than a hundred pages long, and accessible. Marcuse’s philosophical and literary references are evidently drawn from the German philosophical tradition, and may now appear to be dated, but they are not intentionally obscure or obstructive. To me, what permeates a re-reading of Marcuse now is how radical and refreshing his ideas appear despite the lapse of time since their first publication. I am, then, confident that this book will engage the interest of second- and third-year undergraduates in the arts, humanities and social sciences; and graduates in areas such as cultural policy, radical philosophy, and research between culture and the political sciences. It may also be relevant to the professional practices of artists, planners and policy makers seeking to look beyond a society governed by the notion that there is no alternative to the way things are. New social movements have proclaimed that a new society is possible; Marcuse’s theories link the possibility to a careful reordering of the implicit values of the existing society, and a robust indication of its contradictions. Miles T02094 01 text 2 07/11/2011 15:15 IntroductIon 3 WHy reAd mArcuse noW? Marcuse’s aesthetic theories were contextualised by the political realities of the 1930s (the rise of fascism), the 1960s (the counter- culture), and the 1970s (the aftermath of the failed revolt of 1968). Marcuse did not think that history repeated itself; yet if freedom was only a dream in the 1930s, against totalitarianism, and became a dream again in the 1970s (as now) in face of the rise of globalised capitalism, it is appropriate to recall the interlude of hope which occurred between these dire outlooks. Marcuse wrote in 1972 that, ‘In its extreme manifestations, it [the capitalist system] practices the horrors of the Nazi regime.’9 William Robinson writes that ‘Transnational capital and its political agents are attempting ... a vast shift in the balance of class and social forces worldwide to consolidate the neo-liberal counterrevolution of the 1980s.’10 I do not equate advanced capitalism and the Nazi state, but the extent to which neo-liberalism and earlier forms of totalitarianism seek total control of society – now by the soft forces of consumerism and culture – implies that a common form of analysis is needed. But does this include aesthetics? Marcuse argued in The Aesthetic Dimension that a concern with aesthetics is justified when political change appears remote. Today, the sporadic growth of new political formations in single-issue campaigning and activism inspires hope, but this is too easily marginalised. Now is an appropriate time, then, for a critical reconsideration of the optimism of the 1960s which Marcuse reflected in his writing. The prospect of a new society was (and might still be) electrifying and contagious, a force to interrupt – and rout – the notion that world history has a single, given course. For Marcuse, as for Bloch, to imagine another form of society is to begin the process of its realisation. Encouraged by the counter- culture and the New Left, Marcuse argued that art negated the dominant society, reintroducing the emphasis on sensuality of Marx’s early writings. Marcuse writes of beauty as a non-repressive order, of society as a work of art, and of the reclamation of verbal language to express new values – in the context of a continuing and vital revision of Marxism for the conditions of the twentieth century. New frameworks arose in feminism, post-colonialism, and environmentalism, from the 1970s to the 1990s, but I argue that Marcuse’s work contributes to an imaginative reconstruction of the social order alongside these frameworks, and that they are not incompatible. Miles T02094 01 text 3 07/11/2011 15:15
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